Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  This is my personal e-mail address, Powell said, handing Kay a card as he turned to leave. Write me if you have any concerns or any questions.

  Kay looked at the card when he got back to Langley and almost died laughing. Powell had given him a regular, commercial, America Online e-mail address, a communication method about as secure and confidential as spray-painting graffiti on a highway overpass.

  Here I am sitting in the CIA headquarters, Kay thought. I'm going to send something to an AOL account?

  Kay went to Congress on July 31 to testify in closed session before the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees. Between the two sessions, he spoke briefly to reporters. They had found no smoking gun, Kay said, but added, The American people should not be surprised by surprises. We are determined to take this apart and every day, I must say, we're surprised by new advances that we're making.

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  rumsfeld just was not paying attention, Rice and Hadley had concluded by August 2003. He was not showing the same interest in postwar Iraq as he had with the military invasion plans. The only option was for the NSC to step in and manage Bremer more directly.

  Rice needed someone dedicated to the task, and she thought of the man who had been her boss on the NSC in George H. W. Bush's administration. Robert D. Blackwill, 63, had recently resigned as ambassador to India to teach at Harvard.

  Blackwill had served 22 years in the foreign service and had worked in the upper reaches of the State Department, including a stint as an aide to Henry Kissinger. At 6-foot-3 and heavyset with white hair, he looked like Santa Claus when he smiled. But he was a prickly, demanding boss, who often referred to himself as Godzilla. In India, he had roiled the embassy staff. Two State Department inspector general reports criticized his management style.

  Hadley, the consummate staff man, started canvassing people who had worked with Blackwill. The general report: Don't bring him in. He'll be disruptive. He has a terrible reputation. People don't want to work with him. He's after your job, and he has even let it be known he wants to be Condi's deputy. Al Kamen's popular In the Loop column in The Washington Post in July had quoted unnamed officials— mischief makers, Kamen called them—suggesting that Hadley might move over to the Pentagon to make room for Blackwill.

  But Rice wanted Blackwill's brainpower, so she and Hadley called him the White House. They summarized the rap on him, and said there would be new rules of civility and collegiality if he joined the NSC staff.

  I hear you, Blackwill said. I understand exactly what you're saying and I tell you that you will not have cause to complain.

  In a second tough session, Rice asked Blackwill if he would have trouble working for her, his former subordinate, or for Hadley. He said he would not.

  Blackwill was given the exalted title of coordinator for strategic planning on the NSC staff. Soon Rice made him point man for Iraq.

  After a couple of weeks Blackwill told Rice and Hadley. We're losing. We're just losing this whole thing. The public opinion's going against us. This is awful. We're losing the battle for Iraq heart and soul.

  Rice's immediate concern was not the situation on the ground in Iraq. The problem, she told Blackwill, was the dysfunctional U.S. government. He soon understood what she meant. He attended the deputies committee meetings where Armitage and Doug Feith often sat across from each other in the Situation Room. The hostility between them was enormous, and Blackwill watched as Armitage, a mountain of a man, barked at Feith. It was almost as if Armitage wanted to reach across the table and snap Feith's neck like a twig. Armitage's knuckles even turned white.

  The principals meetings or NSC meetings with Powell and Rumsfeld were not as coarse but had the same surreal quality, rarely airing the real issues. Blackwill, a veteran of the Kissinger style, was astonished. Rumsfeld made his presentation looking at the president, while Powell looked straight ahead. Then Powell would make his to the president with Rumsfeld looking straight ahead. They didn't even comment on each other's statements or views. So Bush never had the benefit of a serious, substantive discussion between his principal advisers. And the president, whose legs often jiggled under the table, did not force a discussion.

  Blackwill saw Rice try to intervene and get nowhere. So critical comments and questions—especially about military strategy—never surfaced. Blackwill felt sympathy for Rice. This young woman, he thought, had to deal with three of the titans of national security—Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell—all of whom had decades of experience, cachet and strong views. The image locked in Blackwill's mind of Rice, dutiful, informed and polite, at one end of the table, and the inexperienced president at the other, legs dancing, while the bulls staked out their ground, almost snorting defiantly, hoofs pawing the table, daring a challenge that never came.

  David Kay's people developed a solid explanation for why Saddam's regime had been so bent on acquiring 60,000 aluminum tubes. Powell had told the U.N. the tubes were for a centrifuge system to be used in Saddam's nuclear weapons program. The evidence now showed that the tubes were meant for conventional artillery shells, just as the Iraqis had maintained before the war. The propellant for the rockets was produced by an Iraqi company run by a close friend of Saddam's son Qusay. The propellant was lousy, but nobody in the Iraqi military had the clout to tell a friend of Qusay's to improve his products or lose the contract. So the artillery scientists came up with a work-around: tighten the specifications on the aluminum tubes, making them smaller and lighter so that the weak propellant would still work.

  One of the prisoners the U.S. was holding and interrogating was the former head of the procurement arm of the Iraqi military. We bought these tubes because we had a contract, he said under interrogation. He explained the bureaucratic process, and how they had felt that tightening the specifications was the only option. Kay's group tracked down some of the military officers involved in the rocket program, who confirmed the story. We never wanted these, one said. We kept trying to cancel the contract but they told us we had to honor the contract.

  To Kay, it almost sounded like a Washington or Pentagon contracting scandal, with $500 toilet seats and $1,000 hammers.

  Kay's team uncovered evidence showing how Saddam spied on and tracked the U.N. inspection programs. At one point, they found a full set of faxes that U.N. inspectors had sent back and forth between Baghdad, New York and Vienna, home of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which oversaw prewar WMD inspections in Iraq. These were not electronic intercepts, but were the actual faxes, which meant that the Iraqis had spies or agents of some kind who could get physical access to the IAEA offices. In one case Kay saw that a fax the Iraqis had taken was an original, with handwritten notes that a member of his inspection team had made on the document years earlier.

  Kay had extraordinary incentives to offer Iraqis for proof of WMD, including $10 million from a CIA covert fund that he could use to pay informants. He could also provide green cards to cooperative Iraqis who wanted to live and work in the United States. His group could move people out of Iraq and relocate them to other countries. They put out word of the program on the street hoping to attract genuine informers, and about 100 people came forward with information that seemed good enough to investigate. But virtually nothing panned out, and Kay wound up moving only one person to the U.S. It was all I didn't see, but my neighbor saw. Others were coming in with pieces of equipment, making up stories and saying, oh, this came from a chemical weapon. There were all sorts of hoaxes.

  At another point, Kay's communication teams were able to eavesdrop on a conversation an Iraqi scientist had with his wife, who was pleading with her husband. They were desperate, and she was begging him to go tell the Americans anything so that they could get some of the reward money and leave the country.

  I don't know anything, the scientist said. We didn't have anything. I can't give the Americans anything. We didn't have it.

  Kay had interrogators interview all of the senior Iraqi officials in U.S. custody. It was amazing. None
of the Iraqis had actually seen any WMD, but they all believed that such unconventional weapons existed somewhere else in Saddam's arsenal. To a person, they assumed that Saddam Hussein was making a lot of public noise about destroying his weapons stockpiles after the 1991 Gulf War for the benefit of the rest of the world, but that he'd never really be stupid enough to actually follow through. But it looked more and more like that was exactly what Saddam had done.

  Through the end of September, Kay's group made lots of ambiguous discoveries— dual-use production facilities or chemicals that could be used for either weapons or non-WMD products. Chlorine could be used to make chemical weapons, or it could be used to purify water for swimming pools. Kay never had a Eureka! moment, but he gradually concluded that the reason they weren't finding WMD stockpiles was because they simply didn't exist.

  General John Abizaid had taken over as commander of CENTCOM in July. Kay started getting hints that he and Rumsfeld wanted to reassign Kay's Iraq Survey Group to additional missions such as counterterrorism. Kay called Tenet. George, this isn't going to happen, he said. You know, we had an agreement that they would focus on WMD until I had concluded. I've been around Washington too long. I know when you get multiple objectives you usually don't achieve any of them.

  “Absolutely, Tenet said. You're right. I'll go talk to Rumsfeld.

  Soon, they had another conversation.

  I told Rumsfeld that if he did this, you would resign, Tenet told Kay.

  From June to August 2003 there had been a change in the nature of violent incidents in Iraq. In June an average of 35 to 38 violent incidents occurred each day, and the U.S. forces would have initiated half of them. In contrast, on one day in August, insurgents initiated 28 out of 33 violent incidents. Consistently, Armitage saw, the insurgents were taking the initiative in two thirds of the violent encounters now. That meant to him that the general Iraqi population was sitting in neutral, waiting to see who would win or lose and whether the U.S. forces would stay or leave. The Iraqis probably knew who some of the insurgents were and where they were, but they weren't telling the United States or other coalition forces ahead of time.

  In his office at the State Department, Armitage looked over the data. He felt like he'd already seen this movie during his three tours on the ground in Vietnam. He didn't like the ending.

  In the summer doldrums without a lot of news, The Washington Post ran a front-page story on August 4, 2003, saying that Powell and Armitage had signaled they would leave the administration even if Bush were reelected. It was something both had indicated in private, reflecting their on-again, off-again, thoroughly schizophrenic attitudes toward being high-level officials in the Bush administration.

  With violence mounting in Iraq, Bush did not want to lose his reluctant warrior or leave the impression that there was any distance between him and Powell. He knew that Powell and Armitage operated as a duo, glued together permanently. So he invited both men to his ranch in Crawford.

  The first afternoon, Powell and Armitage arrived, changed into casual clothes and went over to the president's ranch house.

  Do you want a drink? Bush asked.

  A double martini, Armitage replied.

  Bush, the former heavy drinker, stared at him in mild surprise.

  Nah, nah, Armitage said. Actually a nonalcoholic beer.

  Bush laughed.

  Later they had cigars and Bush drove them on the standard tour of the ranch.

  The three had a pleasant dinner with Laura Bush, Rice and Powell's wife, Alma. The next day they sat down for a three-hour discussion of foreign policy.

  Let's get one thing clear so we can truthfully say it never came up, Powell began. We're not going to talk about this press story about Rich and I leaving.

  Bush swept his hand in the air as if to wave the topic away. They went on to have an unremarkable discussion about where they were going in foreign policy.

  In a brief session with the press on August 6, Bush said that Powell has done a fabulous job, and added, The fact that he is here in Crawford, Texas, talking about issues of importance should say loud and clear to the American people that he's completely engaged and doing what he needs to do, and that is serve as a great secretary of state.

  Powell added dutifully, I don't have a term. I serve the president. What they called the whispering campaign against them slowed down, only to be refocused on Tenet.

  Former Speaker Newt Gingrich was regularly in touch with the White House, especially Cheney and Rove. There was a simple explanation why Bush would cling to Powell, he said. Why would you go into a general election getting rid of the guy who has the highest approval rating in the country?

  Rice was at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia on August 19, 2003, playing tennis on the last day of her vacation. It was one of those rare four-day periods when not much had happened.

  The person on duty as her secure communications operator came running up. I have to talk to you.

  A massive truck bomb had gone off at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. Reports were incomplete but there were many killed and injured. Sergio Vieira de Mello, the delegation head, was injured and reportedly buried in the rubble but able to talk to rescue workers. Rice packed up her car and she and her security and communications team headed back to Washington.

  Vieira de Mello is dead, the watch officer from the Situation Room said in a call.

  Rice felt as if she'd been punched in the gut. She had personally urged Vieira de Mello, a highly respected diplomat who had been with the U.N. for 34 years, to go to Iraq.

  What an outrage, Bush told her when they spoke later, that terrorists would go after the UN.

  She said it was apparently the first such attack of this magnitude on a U.N. headquarters. The final death toll was 22, with many more wounded. Hit-and-run attacks had occurred before, but such wholesale barbarity? For Rice, it meant something else was going on here. It was devastating and symbolic at once. What was happening? She felt out of touch.

  Bush met with the National Security Council the next day, August 20. “An ugly day for freedom, but it should toughen our resolve to do what we have to do for freedom, he said. We're at war. It's a different kind of war, but war nonetheless, and we will win it. Terrorists want us to retreat and we cannot. We need to redouble our efforts against terror.

  Having set the tone, the president went into some operational matters. We need to make assessments about what are the soft targets that are in Iraq? How are we going to harden those soft targets? Look, we need to reanalyze the enemy. What's his strategy? We've got to be constantly reviewing our offensive plan to take into account the changes we're seeing. He added, This is a thinking enemy that changes, and as he changes, we need to change. And attacking the U.N. mission was a change. Now, what has he just told us, this enemy?

  They were facing a host of new questions, and Bush rattled some of them off. What are we going to do about bad guys coming out of Syria and Iran? We need to counter those. We need better intel and military capabilities to deal with these guys. But he quickly pulled back from the more specific things that needed to be addressed. Groups that respond by pulling out of Iraq are simply giving in to the killers and rewarding them, he said, back in pep talk mode.

  Bremer, who was piped into the meeting over the secure video teleconference, said the U.N. attack needed to be a wake-up call for the Iraqis, and that the temporary Iraqi Governing Council had to take action. They need to get their faces out front, Bremer said, both internationally and with their own people. We need to rally the Iraqi people so they will rally the international community, he said. He wanted the Governing Council to call on the Iraqi people to support the police and the army.

  Do we have the communications strategy to be able to run with Al Jazeera? Bush asked.

  We have a network. We're using it, someone said.

  We should— Do we have the communications network? Bush asked.

  Yes, someone said again. We have our network, and we're also tryin
g to use Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya to the extent we can.

  Our theme should be that the Iraqis should not allow foreign fighters to come into Iraq, the president said. We need to play on a sense of nationalism that will motivate Iraqis to cooperate with us to exclude the foreigners.

  The irony of the commander in chief of an occupation force of approximately 130,000 heavily armed foreign troops saying they should play on Iraqi nationalism and convince the people of Iraq to exclude the foreigners seemed to go unnoticed.

  We need to look at all possible sources of attack from all groups, Bush said. Who did this and who do we worry about? We've learned something. We need to reevaluate who is the enemy, what are his tactics, and how do we adapt to it?

  It was a wake-up call for Bush and his war cabinet, but the president avoided mentioning it publicly. He flew to the Pacific Northwest to give speeches on the environment. Two days after the NSC meeting, a reporter asked him whether the conflict in Iraq was becoming a guerrilla war against the West.

  The way I view this is Iraq is turning out to be a continuing battle in the war on terror, Bush said. You know, it's one thing to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in order to protect America and our friends and allies, which we did. And then there are—we found resistance from former Baathist officials. These people decided that, well, they'd rather fight than work for peaceful reconstruction of Iraq because they weren't going to be in power anymore. I also believe there's a foreign element that is moving into Iraq and these will be al-Qaeda-type fighters. They want to fight us there because they can't stand the thought of a free society in the Middle East. They hate freedom. They hate the thought of a democracy emerging. And therefore, they want to violently prevent that from happening.

  He added in a radio address on August 23 that the picture in most of Iraq was rosy, despite the attack on the U.N. There is steady movement toward reconstruction and a stable, self-governing society. This progress makes the remaining terrorists even more desperate and willing to lash out against symbols of order and hope, like coalition forces and U.N. personnel. The world will not be intimidated. A violent few will not determine the future of Iraq, and there will be no return to the days of Saddam Hussein's torture chambers and mass graves.